How to do a Time Lapse using a ZWO Camera and Sharpcap

How-to July 27, 2018

Time lapse tutorial put together by Matthew Knight using a ZWO Camera and Sharpcap

The video guide:

Requirements

Have a ZWO Camera

Having a ZWO Camera will be easy to use unless you're more advanced with a modded cam. Just make sure your ZWO camera has the ZWO 1/3″ 2.1mm 150 degree lens that ships with the camera seen Here. Make sure you install the ZWO camera drivers or Drivers for your camera.

You will need a Laptop

Laptop is needed to run Sharpcap make sure you have a lot of hard drive space... 500GB or more because you can go from 1 hour that will be 16 GB in file size for just 1 hour of recording...

Start up Sharpcap I assume you have the camera connected to your Laptop by this time.

Once Sharpcap is loaded at the top left you should see a tab that says, ''Cameras'' click that tab look to see if your camera is listed, if you're not using a ZWO camera its possible your camera isn't supported by Sharpcap if your camera is a ZWO camera and not listed possible software issue or drivers not installed...

If your camera is listed pick it you should be able to see the sky if the fisheye lens is in focus you might need to play around with it till the sky comes into focus.
If it's already dark out and you don't see the sky on Sharpcap you will need to adjust the Exposure and Gain and play around with the fisheye lens until you see the sky.

Yes! I can see the sky and camera is focused!

If you can see the sky and the stars are nicely focused you can begin recording your time-lapse.

Starting Time lapse:

Click the Start Capture tab at the top left of Sharpcap.

On the Sharpcap - Configure Capture Window you should see:

1. Single Frame

2. Unlimited

3. Number of frames

4. Time limit ✔

We wanna go with Time limit set the Hour, Minutes and Seconds for how long you wanna Capture.

Keep in mind the longer you record the more hard drive space you're gonna use up.

Under Capture Sequence of Captures:

Sequence Length; This is how many captures you wanna do say you wanna recored for 6 hours but you wanna Capture 1 hour parts 6 times then you'd set the Time limit to 1 hour and the Sequence Length to 6 Which will break 6 hours into 1 hour Captures or you can just set 6 hours for Time limit and have it be 1 big 6 hour capture.

Interval between Captures, If you're wanting to capture a Meteor shower I'd recommend setting it to 00:00:01 to capture every 1 second.

Note:

A 10 minute recording for me I only had 15 seconds of video.

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